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Cody, a chocolate Labrador, has for months greeted customers at the Clearwater BP gas station and convenience store at U.S. 19 and Nursery Road. A St. Petersburg Times story introduced thousands more to the jovial pup. But Thursday morning, a state health inspector stopped by and issued a warning to Karim Mansour, the store's owner: Remove the dog or the Health Department would declare all of Mansour's food products — mostly bottled sodas, Slim Jims and candy bars — unfit for consumption. Mansour, who adopted 6-year-old Cody three years ago, had no choice but sign the warning. His primary violation:...

[no excerpt, the miserable curs at AP, who digitized Sarah's entire book and published large chunks of it, claiming "fair use", don't like to be hoist on their own petard, whatever. The gist of the original AP story is, the Jews start all wars.]

Worn teeth, periodontal diseases, abscesses and cavities tormented the ancient Egyptians, according to the first systematic review of all studies performed on Egyptian mummies in the past 30 years. After examining research of more than 3,000 mummies, anatomists and paleopathologists at the University of Zurich concluded that 18 percent of all mummies in case reports showed a nightmare array of dental diseases... Published in the Journal of Comparative Human Biology (HOMO), the review takes into consideration all studies published since 1977, when computed tomography was first applied to ancient Egyptian mummies. CT imaging revealed an impressive collection of diseases, including...

Portland has the 19th worst traffic congestion in the country, with 23 percent of the city’s roads having “heavy delays,” according to a report released Wednesday.Seattle’s road woes are the worst, followed by Los Angeles at No. 2, with 38 percent of its roads having heavy delays, followed by Chicago (37 percent), San Francisco (35 percent) and New York City (31 percent), according to global positioning system (GPS) company TomTom of Concord, Mass.The company ranked cities as most to least congested according to how fast cars could travel on the street network. Traffic was defined as congested if drivers...

Economy class flights are cramped at the best of times, so imagine being stuck next to someone so large they take up half the aisle, too. This image was captured by an air stewardess who wanted to demonstrate to her boss exactly why obese passengers should be made to buy an extra seat. The photograph has since appeared on web forums used by flight attendants, where many appeared to agree with the crew member. One user posted the comment: 'Sympathise with the guy or not, he's a major safety hazard in an evacuation and a gross inconvenience for the cabin...

AN ancient bridge over the River Thames in England has sold for nearly $1.7 million at auction. The high price tag ... is down to a special act of Parliament which means the new owner can collect a tax free toll from those crossing the river. There is one drawback. Local people want to scrap the toll, saying it amounts to 'highway robbery'.

There's been much debate about how to handle overweight passengers on flights. While some airlines may charge for an extra seat, not all do — and now a flight attendant allegedly snapped a photo on an American Airlines flight (destination and take-off point unknown), which of course has been leaked to the press. A Flight Global blog got a hold of the photo, which they say the attendant took to "show her manager what was happening on the aircraft and why she was unhappy about it. Seems the guy paid for only one seat and the gate staff let him...

This squib appeared on the KHOU website on November 18 but is seems to be only a fraction of the story. Read the comments below the story please. ATLANTA -- AirTran Airways says a flight from Atlanta to Houston with more than 70 passengers on board was delayed when a passenger refused to end a cell phone call. ... Flight 297, a Boeing 717, was taxiing on the runway in Atlanta Tuesday afternoon when a crew member asked a passenger to turn off his phone. ... after several failed attempts by the crew member to end the conversation, the captain...

A team of Hungarian marine archaeologists has found the wreckage of a Dutch cargo ship which sank near the Brazilian coast over three centuries ago. Voetboog was a three-mast flyboat, which left the port of Batavia (now Jakarta) for The Netherlands with a 109-member crew on board, the expedition leader Attila K. Szaloky told MTI. Owned by the Dutch East India Company, the Fluyt ship carried silk, spices, tea, Japanese and Chinese porcelain as well as nearly 180,000 pieces of Dutch golden ducats. The estimated value of the wreckage is about 1 billion dollars, he said. Sailing on the Atlantic,...

A family that planned to spend winter in a woodstove-heated wall tent ...near Talkeetna with a dozen dogs gave up over the weekend, a few days after the mother was evacuated with severely frostbitten hands. The father and a teenager walked 7 miles out to civilization on Saturday, the son also suffering from frostbite. Then, authorities had to mount another difficult operation to rescue a dozen dogs ...

She was probably 16 years old and had a wide, flat Asian face, a long neck and a slim figure. The girl died 1,500 years ago. But now she's reborn -- well, partially, at least. The restoration is the result of two years of interdisciplinary work that brought together experts in archaeology, forensic medicine, anatomy, genetics, chemistry and other fields -- a notable step forward in Korean archaeology. In December 2007, archaeologists discovered the complete remains of the girl and partial remains of three others in a tomb in Changnyeong County, South Gyeongsang... The work revealed that the four...

<p>Obese Air Passenger In Economy Seat Has Picture Taken An image of an obese passenger squeezed into an economy airline seat has reopened a debate about how airlines deal with growing numbers of oversized passengers.</p> <p>The picture, posted on an aviation blog, was reportedly taken by a flight attendant to illustrate to airline managers the difficulty of dealing with passengers who cannot fit into seats. It is unclear if the man was aware his picture was being taken or whether the flight, on US carrier American Airlines, took off with the passenger spilling out of his seat.</p>

Note: The following text is a quote: Travel Alert U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Bureau of Consular Affairs This information is current as of today, Mon Nov 30 2009 15:16:56 GMT-0800 (PST). Philippines November 24, 2009 The State Department alerts U.S. citizens of the risks of travel to the southern Philippine islands of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago and urges extreme caution if traveling there. This Travel Alert reflects the recent acts of violence in the Mindanao province of Maguindanao and is supplemental to our September 17, 2009 Travel Warning to the Philippines. This Travel Alert expires on January 6, 2010....

Maybe we could learn something from this? Did thinking like this make your enemies think twice?

A man had to make the terrible choice of rescuing his wife or teenage son when their car plunged into a river at the weekend. Stacey Horton saved his wife, Vanessa, and their 13-year-old son Silva drowned in the Whanganui River. Mid-Central police communications manager Kim Perks said today it was a very tough call for Mr Horton. "I would certainly not have wanted to be in his shoes." Mrs Horton, 35, was driving Silva, his best friend, Robert Palmer, 14, and the family dog when her Mazda MPV stationwagon went off Somme Parade in Wanganui and plunged down a...

Scientists have long debated the nature of Europe's ancient landscape and hesitated between a nightmarish, close-canopied forest and a pasture woodland of oak and hazel trees, similar to the modern New Forest, which is kept open by grazing animals... Together with Dr David Smith, a specialist on environmental archaeology at the University of Birmingham, Whitehouse decided to look for clues in an overlooked source: ancient beetle remains... Whitehouse and Smith looked at 26 beetle assemblages from different parts of Britain, from Thorne Moors in Yorkshire to Silbury in Hampshire, and looked at how beetle communities changed over 7000 years,...

KABUL — A dozen prisoners escaped jail through a tunnel they dug from their cell to the outside in western Afghanistan, police said Saturday. Afghan police arrested three men for the shooting death of an Afghan Red Crescent official in northern Afghanistan. The shooting Friday was an apparent attempt to settle a long-standing dispute. In the prison escape, the inmates included low-level Taliban militants, drug-dealers and other minor criminals, said Farah province police chief Gen. Mohammad Faqir Askar. A 13th prisoner arrested during his attempted escape said the tunnel took 10 days to dig and the plan was to slowly...

Jean-Yves Blondeau (Aix les Bains, 1970 - ), also known as "Rollerman", is a French designer who is best known for creating the 31-wheel roller suit (Buggy Rollin'). This suit places a number of rollers (similar to those found on rollerblades) on most of the major joints, the torso, and the back. The wearer can ride in a variety of positions (rollerblade, on back, on torso, on all fours, etc.) at speeds of up to 60 mph (96 km/h). He has been featured on television shows in several countries.

The first Pictish throne to be built for a millennium has been unveiled by researchers investigating the lives of Scotland's most mysterious tribal people. The team spent a year crafting the oak of five Scottish trees into a design modelled on ancient carvings in a project that cost around £10,000. Raised thrones were important symbols of Pictish power for church leaders and kings, but none survive. The project at the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) is part of a three-year research programme, sponsored by the Glenmorangie whisky company, and aims to improve understanding of Scottish history from 300AD to 900AD......

Few activities in life are as seemingly mundane yet vitally important as eating... Ritual feasts and banquets in the Biblical world and beyond were particularly important occasions for showing devotion to a deity, solidifying social relationships and ranks, as well as teaching lessons. In antiquity, even the gods had to eat. Temple officials in ancient Babylon and Egypt were tasked with the daily feeding of their deities. The statues of these deities were more than just depictions for their worshipers; they were themselves divine, and they needed to be fed, bathed, clothed and cared for. An elaborate ritual known as...

In 1965, a mural was discovered in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, when local authorities decided to build a road in the middle of the Afrasiab tepe. A tepe is a mound marking an ancient site, in this case pre-Mongol Samarkand. When it was found, the mural was weathered and its images obscured. But those who discovered it had the foresight to make a drawing of it, from which replicas have been made. A replica of this mural is now being shown as part of the exhibit "The Crossroads of Civilizations: The Asian Culture of Uzbekistan" until September of next year at the...

Early modern humans and their predecessors in Europe were mostly big game hunters, but a pile of well-nibbled bird bones suggests that at least some prehistoric European cavemen enjoyed small prey too, according to a new study. The 202 bones, belonging to the Aythya genus of diving ducks, were found at Bolomor Cave near the town of Tavernes in Valencia, Spain. The ducks date to around 150,000 years ago, and were not eaten daintily. "The birds were de-fleshed using both stone tools and teeth," co-author Ruth Blasco told Discovery News, noting that some of the ducks may have even been...

A joint expedition of Russian and Korean archeologists studying a site of Balhae Era resulted in finding evidences that prove existence of a big administrative centre in the Primorye Territory in the 9th-11th centuries. "We have found a building in the shape of a palace, well-known to us from diggings of capital cities of Balhae in China. Nothing of the kind had been found in the Primorye before. The discovery confirms the supposition that Primorye was not just a periphery of the Balhae state, but an administrative centre once existed there. We are going to find out what it was...

Copenhagen’s sex trade did brisk business during the recent business climate conference. The global climate challenge may have been on the daytime agenda during the recent World Business Summit climate conference in Copenhagen, but in the evenings many businessmen, politicians and civil servants are reported to have availed themselves of the capital’s prostitutes. “We’ve been extremely busy. Politicians also need to relax after a long day,” says ‘Miss Dina’, herself a prostitute.

ABOARD AMTRAK AUTO TRAIN 52 TO WASHINGTON - All aboard on this train doesn’t mean just people. It means minivans, cars and motorcycles, too. To board you have to be packing some serious luggage: Every traveler must also be transporting a vehicle. Amtrak’s Auto Train, the only one like it in the nation, has only two stops: one near Orlando, Fla., and the other in Virginia near Washington, D.C. For more than 25 years, it has carried vacationers and their vehicles, and a new $10 million station expected to open in Florida in 2010 may mean even more passengers. ~~~SNIP~~~...

This year has seen the discovery in Ethiopia of Ardi, the fossil skeleton believed to be the oldest human relative. But long before Ardi came Java Man, who was unearthed in the Indonesian village of Sangiran 120 years ago. Christine Finn has been on a quest to find the origins of this paleo-celebrity... Java Man. The name sounds like a 1970s men's aftershave. One possibly not much used because the face, lovingly reconstructed by the palaeontologists, suggested he was no great shaver. He also had small, deep-set eyes and an enormous jaw. But Java Man was still a hero when...

Archaeologists warn that the Taliban are destroying Pakistan's ancient Gandhara heritage and rich Buddhist legacy as pilgrimage and foreign research dries up in the country's northwest. "Militants are the enemies of culture," said Abdul Nasir Khan, curator of Taxila Museum, one of the premier archeological collections in Pakistan. "It is very clear that if the situation carries on like this, it will destroy our culture and will destroy our cultural heritage," he told AFP. Taxila, a small town around 20 kilometres south of Islamabad, is one of Pakistan's foremost archeological attractions given its history as a centre of Buddhist learning...

A new dinosaur found in South Africa has given scientists a glimpse into the evolution of sauropods, the biggest animals ever to have walked the Earth, a new study says. The newfound, 20-foot-long (7-meter-long) dinosaur species is a close cousin to the common ancestor of all sauropods -- gigantic, four-legged, long-necked, big-bellied plant-eaters. Dubbed Aardonyx celestae, the 195-million-year-old dinosaur had a lot of sauropod-like features, such as a robust skeleton for holding up its heft. (See extreme dinosaur pictures.) Unlike sauropods, though, the newfound species walked on two legs and only dropped down on all fours, the new research shows....

Brisbane may be 2000 years and half-a-world away from Pompeii, but it hasn't stopped a UQ archaeologist from digging up some hidden treasures. Dr Andy Fairbairn, a senior lecturer in archaeology with UQ's School of Social Science, is working on a project looking at the life inside one of the world's most famous dig sites... He does this by collecting samples from what would have been the toilets of the day to see the types of food were eaten... He said his team of volunteer archaeology students patiently go through hundreds of bags of samples collected in Pompeii, looking for...

For years, storms along the Alabama coast have often exposed the wreckage of a sailing ship that locals suspected was a Civil War blockade runner or a Prohibition-era rum runner or various vessels in between. When Tropical Storm Ida struck Nov. 10, the charred wooden hull reappeared on the beach six miles east of Fort Morgan in Baldwin County. The wreck is most likely to be the three-masted schooner Rachel, which ran aground on the peninsula in the first half of the 1900s, according to Mike Bailey, Fort Morgan events coordinator... The Rachel was built by John DeAngelo in Moss...

I know I need a birth certificate...what else? I am seriously looking at leaving the USA until it becomes a place that embraces liberty, capitalism, and freedom.

A neat video of about four minutes on what pirates can expect if they attack a vessel outfitted by this new security technology.The water walls may be new technology, but the armed snipers are almost as old as piracy itself.

CHICAGO (WBBM) -- Holiday travel for Amtrak started a couple of days ago and runs through next Tuesday. Amtrak travel has seen more interest with a 20 percent increase in Illinois ridership since 2007.  Travel by rail is expected to continue that trend.  Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari says holiday travel by rail stretches several days longer than at the airports, with today being busiest day for passengers.  He expects 125,000 passengers will board an Amgrak train before Thanksgiving Day, a 70 percent increase in normal ridership for midweek. Amtrak is prepared, scheduling extra trains and longer train to accommodate more...

Americans searching for cheaper Thanksgiving tripsThe Miles family is changing it up this year in the annual American race to make it to the table for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead of booking plane tickets, they opted to take the 1,100-mile trip by train. Airline tickets seemed too pricey, so they paid $800 for the five of them to travel roundtrip by train from their Syracuse, N.Y., home to Omaha, Neb. to see family. Airfare would have totaled more than $2,500, the family said. "Economic considerations topped the list for us," Maureen Miles, 44, a doctor's office receptionist, said sitting with her...

Alittle late in making those Thanksgiving flight plans? Wondering how you could possibly afford your ticket -- that is, without putting a kidney up for sale on Craigslist? Good news! You can get a free flight home on Southwest plus a $300 travel voucher. Just do what I plan to -- get on a Southwest flight in the next few days, and when it's taking off, shout over and over, "Go, plane, go!" and "I want Daddy! I want Daddy!" Pamela Root got the free flight and the voucher, plus an apology from Southwest, after her 2-year-old kept screaming those...

Sorry about not putting up an image last week -- circumstances intervened. But I had already come up with this idea, and I think it's appropriate for a holiday (at least in the U.S.) week where there are a lot of travelers. Also, this is a user participation thread. I invite readers to find other examples and post them here. If you've never done that before, if you find an image, you can (in Windows) click on it and get an option to "Copy Image Location". If you do that, then in a response you use HTML code: img src="image...

...Maine has a reputation of pulling archaeology out of Sunday supplement romances into science. The University of Maine excavation at Passadumkeag, along with several smaller digs scattered through the state, resulted in a detailed picture of Red Paint Man, inhabiting Maine about 1,000 B.C. His tools, utensils, and other Old Stone Age handicraft along with his usage of red ochre strongly suggest that this proto-Indian still practised Cro-Magnon culture. Another excavation at Pemaquid Point awoke a successful settlement from its long sleep under several feet of soil. Radiocarbon dating set it as early as 1540 A.D., and the colony persisted...

In 2004, the European Space Agency released a design study called “Human Missions to Mars: Overall Architecture Assessment”. This study was undertaken after a decade of work, notably by David Baker, Jim French, and Robert Zubrin, which established that local propellant production using the Martian atmosphere would be a key technology for practical human access to the Red Planet.

Artist Jens Werner Andersen from Norway painted his house in Burberry check pattern. He said he woke up one day and thought it would be a fun idea. The 33-year-old decided to turn his home, a former public lavatory building in Larvik, Norway, into a "gathering place for happy people". We wonder if his neighbours were quite so happy

A marvelous painting of a gourmand at his table hangs in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris — a portly, pink-faced figure happily gorging on a regal casserole, with a bottle of wine at one elbow and a luscious-looking soufflé at the other. It is traditionally believed to be a portrait of Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, an aristocrat notorious in Napoleonic France for gratifying his palate with the same abandon as his contemporary the Marquis de Sade showed in indulging carnal desires. Whether or not the painting is actually Grimod’s likeness, it captures the eccentric, omnivorous spirit that made him...

For two millennia the Great Drain has carried the mineral-rich waters of Britain's only hot spring from the Roman Bath in Bath to the nearby River Avon. The drain runs for nearly half a mile under the city but although parts of it are large enough for a man to walk through, it has never been fully explored. Archaeologists will have their first opportunity to get inside the previously inaccessible sections of the Great Drain this month when engineers open it up for repairs. A stretch of drain built long after the Romans is causing the difficulties. The extension was...

After the discovery of the building that perhaps supported Nero's rotating dining room on the Palatine, excavations for Line C of Rome's subway brought to light a building that, according to the first hypotheses made by archaeologists, is thought to be Hadrian's Academy, built in 133 A.D. to host poets, rectors, philosophers, men of letters, scientists and magistrates. Hadrian, or Publius Aelius Hadrianus, ruled from 117-138 AD. He was an avid philosopher who was commonly referred to as one of the "five good emperors." Hadrian's Wall, in Northern England was built after a great war in what was then called...

Scotland already has more identified Roman camps than any other European country -- reflecting Rome's repeated attempts to stamp its rule on the troublesome north. Now the number is set to increase. The first comprehensive survey of Roman remains for 30 years will boost the total of officially recognised sites and give them greater legal protection, officials said yesterday. Traces of at least 225 Roman military camps dot the Scottish countryside from the Borders to Aberdeenshire... They can be spotted today mostly from the air, where the distinctive bank and ditch defences thrown up by the legionaries still mark the...

An investigation into temples built by Greek colonists in Sicily has found strong evidence that they were aligned to the East. The findings, by Alun Salt, of the University of Leicester, suggest that Ancient Greek religion may have included ritual elements inspired by astronomy, as well as illuminating the national culture of settlers who founded communities beyond the mainland. The study could settle a long-running dispute among archaeologists and classicists about temple orientation. Although it has long been known that most of these shrines face east, some academics have questioned whether this alignment reflected a deliberate plan. Critics of astronomical...

A team of Bulgarian archaeologists led by Veselin Ignatov formally presented Tuesday their finds from the tomb of an aristocrat from Ancient Thrace near the southern town of Nova Zagora. In October and November 2009, Ignatov's team found a burial tomb of dated back to the end of 1st century and beginning of 2nd century AD, located outside of the village of Karanovo, in southern Bulgaria. The finds at the lavish Thracian tomb include gold rings, silver cups and vessels coated with gold and clay vessels. Those include two silver cups with images of love god Eros, and a number...

RESCUE: Snowmachiners come to aid of passengers, including infant twins. Without a word, with the plane at 4,500 feet, pilot Bradley Amos tapped something on the instrument panel. Seven passengers -- including twin 8-month-old girls -- were in the cabin. Soon came a loud popping sound. The plane's single propeller suddenly stopped turning and the smell of engine smoke filtered past the seats. The Cessna 207 glided without power above the tundra in Southwest Alaska. That was the low point of the Wednesday night flight. Here's the highlight: Within what felt like two minutes, the plane was on the ground....

Dutch researcher Eva Kaptijn succeeded in discovering -- based on 100,000 finds -- that the Zerqa Valley in Jordan had been successively inhabited and irrigated for more than 13,000 years. But it was not just communities that built irrigation systems: the irrigation systems also built communities... she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they'd pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just...

The animals, which included mammoths, elephant-sized mastodons and beavers the size of black bears, were probably picked off by more inept hunters who only much later developed specialised weapons when their prize catches became scarce. "Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what we've found is not consistent with that rapid 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals," said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team... Gill's team rules this out by putting a more accurate date on the decline and fall...

The gardens were built when the Abbey of Cernes was transformed into a country mansion in the mid-16th century after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. One resident who may have been responsible for the gardens was Denzil Holles, a characterful MP who fought for the Parliamentarians but was a Royalist at heart and who occupied the house from 1642-66. The Rev John Hutchins, a local historian writing in 1774, claimed that he was told that the giant was "a modern thing" cut by Lord Holles. The National Trust, which owns the field where the giant is carved, suggests that the...

According to a new study of clay pots and ceramic tablets discovered almost 70 years ago in Harappa, now in Pakistan, the people of the Indus Valley had a detailed system of commodity value, weights and measures. Dr Bryan Wells, a researcher based at India's Institute of Mathematical Sciences, told The Daily Telegraph he had begun work on his thesis ten years ago when he first saw photographs of the clay pots with markings which appeared to be in proportion to their relative size. But he was not able to test his thesis until he visited New Delhi earlier this...